Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Asexual sapphic MC, asexual sapphic love interest
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 2nd April 2024
ISBN: B0C9ZF3T8B
Goodreads

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.

Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.

Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.

And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~when I tell you that both the US and UK covers accurately represent the story
~this time the monster’s an ACTUAL monster
~wigs
~hurt the giant blue bear and you die
~gold is not a good metal for armour
~kissing = failed cannibalism
~gods damned rosemary

TW for mentions and some discussions of trauma and abuse.

John Wiswell really said “Monster romance? I’ll show you monster romance!” and gave us Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

Which: everyone else can go home, Wiswell wins. It’s not even close.

Because Shesheshen is an actual monster. Not a human with sexy fangs; not attractively muscly under unusually- but prettily-coloured skin; not an unexpectedly aesthetically-pleasing demon under the bed. A gross, icky blob of a monster, who eats humans in graphic detail. All the things monster romances usually give us – the monster being Hot^TM actually; the monster only eating nightmares or just a sip of blood or only really bad people; the monster willingly declawing themself for the sake of their human romantic interest – none of that’s a thing here. Shesheshen is anything but conventionally attractive; she is definitely not a vegan; she is extremely dangerous and always will be. Everything about her is a challenge: Can you, the reader, become attached to and invested in and deeply care about a monster who hits a lot of your ick buttons? Can Wiswell make you love her?

The answer to both those questions is – Oh my gods, YES!!!

Because – despite finding fly eggs in the corpse-leg she’s eating the equivalent of sprinkles on ice-cream – Shesheshen is ENORMOUSLY relatable. Don’t we all wish we could bite the heads off the idiots who wake us up before we’re finished sleeping? Doesn’t everyone want to murder their mother in law?? Is there truly anyone who doesn’t struggle to eat spaghetti neatly??? These are problems I think most of us can empathise with!

Dressing up so that you could eat never made sense to Shesheshen; the food was typically dead and surely unimpressed with its audience.

Shesheshen is the weird alien creature for all of us who ever felt, or still feel like, weird alien creatures; her absolute bafflement when it comes to human behaviour isn’t just hilarious to read, or good worldbuilding (although it is both), but as an autistic reader, it also serves as both validation and relief. Yes, humans do things that make no sense!!! Thank you!!! SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE AT THE BACK!!! So while I do not want to start nomming on my fellow humans, I did feel at home with Shesheshen; this is someone whose mind words very similarly to mine, and that will never stop feeling like a Big Deal when I get to encounter it in fiction. I don’t just love Shesheshen because she’s funny and socially awkward and is a murderous goo-monster (although I do love her for all those things); it’s also because I GET her. And I know I’m not going to be the only reader who feels that way. I love encountering characters who really Are Not Human because they’re interesting, and their perspective on humanity is interesting, but it’s also because I tend to identify with them really hard.

I have Feels about this, okay?

Romance was awful. She couldn’t even do something as simple as murdering rude people anymore.

Besides, ironically, but perhaps not unexpectedly, Shesheshen really is the least fucked-up character in the book. Her thoughts on Homily’s horrifically abusive family, in particular, are going to resonate with anyone who’s ever been in, or been the audience to, a toxic relationship. Shesheshen is too often the only voice of reason in a cacophony of awful or brutalised people; she’s far more human than most of the named characters, a writerly choice that’s both poignant and pointed.

Baroness Wulfyre was an obvious abuser. Surely anyone, even humans, could see why Homily ran away from her family so frequently.

Which leads us to the really, REALLY excellent way Wiswell writes trauma; it’s arguably its own separate plotline throughout the book. I hope Wiswell is not writing from personal experience, but there were times I wanted to claw my own skin off because the scenes were so intensely authentic – and other times I wished I could dive into the pages and murder certain characters, and hug other ones (mostly Homily) very, very tightly. A lot about Someone You Can Build a Nest In is very funny: this is not. Wiswell doesn’t play the trauma for laughs but deals with it respectfully and honestly, perfectly capturing how emotional and verbal abuse can do as much damage – or even more, in the wrong circumstances – as physical abuse. Homily’s family are, to put it mildly, fucking awful, and as heartbreaking as it is to see Homily caught in their riptide… I really appreciated that we also got to see Shesheshen’s wrestling with loving a traumatised person; not (just) in the sense of, I need to help and support this person I care about and that is a complicated and difficult thing to do, but also…falling in love with a traumatised person often means you have fallen for someone shaped by their trauma. Someone who wouldn’t exist without the trauma they went through. Speaking as an abuse survivor now – I’ve never heard anyone say that. I’ve never seen that idea, that thought, put into words before. It is messy and ugly and uncomfortable and true, and I am really grateful for it; as grateful as I am that Wiswell put it on the page as gently and deftly as he did.

This was the same mistake so many humans made: believing someone would leap over trauma when it hurt them badly enough.

That wasn’t how it worked, and the monster knew it. All Shesheshen could do for Homily was be patient with her, and make space for her, and eventually, one day behind her back, eat her mother.

Yeah, this book really hit me hard. I do not regret it in the least. It’s more than just a good book to me; more than just a fun book, an interesting book, a well-written book. It’s deeply personal and meaningful and it slipped under my skin and I’m keeping it there, like Shesheshen and her bear-trap teeth!

Now Homily’s hands muffled a guffaw. It sounded even cuter between her fingers, like the mating call of a sad moose with a cold.

Onto the prose!

Yet another thing that makes Someone You Can Build a Nest In really gods-damn excellent is the way Wiswell uses words – and the way he absolutely commits to writing from a monster’s POV. Some storytellers would simply go ‘wow look at the weird humans being weird’ and leave it at that, but here, Shesheshen’s inherent unhumanness is inextricable from the prose itself. It’s there in the similes and metaphors and imagery Shesheshen uses, and that seats us in the monster’s perspective like few other stories I’ve ever seen. I said earlier that I love how much Shesheshen’s take on humanity overlaps with my own autism, but even the most socially adept readers are going to get Shesheshen because of lines like this

The clouds had run away, ceding the sky to the moon’s dominance and the tapestries of the cosmos.

First off, that is just a very cool image beautifully worded. But it’s also immersing us in Shesheshen’s experience and views of the world. She’s a predator, and nearly everything she sees or thinks or goes through is filtered through that. And by writing in this way, Wiswell makes sure that we see through her eyes too; we absorb her perspective. It’s subtle and brilliant, and proof that you don’t have to write in first-person to get your readers inside your character’s skin.

…Er, so to speak. What with Shesheshen not actually having skin, really. My point stands!

Shesheshen was sure she was smitten. She wanted to spend the entire night devouring everyone in this dance hall with Homily.

A big, heart-warming, absolutely-brought-tears-to-my-eyes part of Shesheshen’s perspective is the body-positivity. Homily, Shesheshen’s beloved, is fat. Plus-sized. Whatever you’d like to call it. And Shesheshen thinks it’s beautiful. Not because it means there’s more of her to eat, either (Shesheshen doesn’t WANT to eat Homily; she wants to eat stupid people WITH Homily. Important distinction!) but because Shesheshen…finds Homily’s size comforting and lovely and attractive. Homily’s weight or size come up over and over across the course of this book, and not ONCE is it in negative terms. Instead we get lines like this

Their bodies eclipsed, Shesheshen’s narrower frame sinking against the protective warmth of the human woman’s chest and belly.

or this

This time when Homily laughed, all the ripples in her large body resonated against Shesheshen. It was better than warmth. It was hypnotic. It was a generosity of skin, like all of Homily was consensually shapeshifting for her, taking the form of shelter.

Homily’s fatness is always portrayed this way; comforting, protective, likened to nests and safe spaces, entrancing. The bit above, about Homily’s shape almost shapeshifting for Shesheshen, is obviously a huge deal for a monstrous shapeshifter who’s never met another of her own kind! And I love it so much; I love getting to see a plus-sized character loved because of her size, not despite it. I loved Shesheshen’s complete lack of human fatphobia. I loved being told, over and over, that a character who looks something like me is beautiful.

WHO GAVE WISWELL PERMISSION TO HIT ME THIS HARD IN THE FEELS?

And look, I could stay here another month, talking about how this monstrous-horror-comedy-fantasy also manages to be anti-capitalist and critique human power structures (especially ones tied up with generational wealth and influence) and quietly but emphatically insist on the importance of consent. I really could! It is just flat-out amazing how much Wiswell manages to weave into this, how he’s telling a fantastic story that manages to make me laugh, cry, flail, AND want to become an anarchist-punk, without ever feeling like he’s lecturing or pushing messaging onto the reader. It all flows together so naturally – like Shesheshen taking on a new shape!

Actually, a lot more gracefully than that. I did not get the impression that Shesheshen’s shapeshifting is easy to watch if you have a weak stomach. Whereas Wiswell’s storytelling flows like water, compulsively readable and easy on the brain even when tackling tough topics. Someone You Can Build a Nest In never felt like work, the way some heavier fantasies do, and I honestly don’t know any other author who’s been able to swing me so fast between almost-crying and giggle-snorting. This book is intense and fun, icky and delightful, wickedly clever and just plain wicked. It’s complex, but also very simple; fucked-up but cosy; a beating, pulsing mass of contradictions that somehow comes together into sheer multi-faceted BRILLIANCE.

I am used to eating alone. I have no idea how civilized people eat with their mouths closed. Is it a performance art?”

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, and now I can confidently say it’s one of the best books of 2024 – maybe the decade. It’s even weirder than I was expecting; it’s softer; it pulls absolutely no punches. The Babadook ended up a queer mascot through a funny accident, but Shesheshen is deliberately, openly, gleefully the monster all of us weird queers and queer weirdos have been pining for; a queer icon from the opening page, who will remain one long after the last.

(Just don’t try to give her a crown or make any fuss. Bother her and you might get eaten!)

THE SHAPESHIFTING SAPPHIC GOO-MONSTER WE DESERVE! And who you will definitely, definitely love!

Someone You Can Build a Nest In is out next Tuesday. Go preorder it if you haven’t already!!!

Related Posts